It sounds super amazing right? You’re taking your flavored gummy vitamins just like you were told when you were younger, everything should be all good right? So then why are you still getting sick a ton and feel like crap? The answer to that is actually a two-parter.
First, our food. Here’s the thing – we all KNOW what we shouldn’t eat. No one needs to tell us to stay out of the drive-thrus and put down the chocolate bars. We get it. We just don’t DO it. Here’s the thing that’s worse though – even if you’re eating clean, green, mean, organic, all those other types of really amazing ways – our soil has been depleted of a lot of the nutrients we had in there just 40 years ago. The food that we’re growing in our U.S. soil just isn’t packing the nutrient punch it did years ago. The sad thing is that the amount of food you’d have to consume to get the vitamins and trace minerals you need on a daily basis is obscene and totally not doable to the average person. So what do we do?
We rely on supplements. Yes, that really scary aisle in the grocery store or health food store with every kind of bottle, shape, and names you can’t pronounce as far as the eye can see. It’s a glorious sight right? Everything has to be the same….. right? Nope. Read on.
Here’s the thing with supplements – a lot of them are synthetic and your body doesn’t know what to do with synthetic things so it just carries them out of the body via fun body processes like urination. Cool right? Not really. What it basically means is that if you’re trying to give your body nutrients and your body isn’t digging what you’re putting in it and carries it right back out your body, what good are you doing?
I know you have good intentions, so that’s why I wanted to create this post. Let me give you an example, take folic acid. How many times (especially if you’re a woman who has been pregnant) have you heard you need to take folic acid? So what do you do, you go to the health food store or grocery store and you pick yourself up a bottle of folic acid. Everything’s groovy!! Yeah, except your body doesn’t know what to do with that because it’s synthetic. Let me break this down for you – folate comes from leafy green veggies like collard greens, spinach, and other foods like avocado, broccoli, garbanzo beans, etc. When we eat these, are bodies are like pacman’s just eating it up and converting the nutrients into usable form by the body – like in this instance your body is converting folate to folic acid and it’s using the folic acid. So if you can’t have folic acid without the body converting folate to it, what’s in that folic acid supplement? See where I’m going here? Do your research on the ingredients before you buy – here’s a great way to know if the supplements in your cabinet are synthetic according to an article on Food Matters, “Identify whole foods in the ingredient list instead of the particular nutrient. Dr. Ben Kim, a chiropractor and acupuncturist with his own radio show, says to look for foods on the list of ingredients that contain a certain vitamin, such as “acerola cherry powder,” which contains vitamin C. If you can identify “vitamin C” in the ingredient list, Kim says you can almost guarantee that the vitamin is synthetic.”
That’s one of the reasons I’ve been taking doTERRA’s Lifelong Vitality Pack since I started using their products (so like 4 years now!). Just a short snippet of this guy from the doTERRA product information page:
“While it is abundantly clear that diets in the United States and in many developed countries include adequate and even an overabundance of calories, a growing body of evidence shows that even as we eat more, we are obtaining less of the essential nutrients vital for optimal health. Over-processed, calorie-rich, nutrient-poor food choices threaten to make us fat even as our bodies are deprived of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. The American Medical Association acknowledges the prudence of taking nutritional supplements, admitting that while “the clinical syndromes of vitamin deficiencies are unusual in Western societies, suboptimal vitamin status is not” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 19, 2002). Microplex VMz is a comprehensive array of vitamins and minerals presented in a food nutrient complex that are essential for normal growth, function, and maintenance of cells.* Microplex VMz provides a balanced blend of essential antioxidant vitamins A, C, and E; an energy complex of B vitamins; and 800 IU of vitamin D.* It also contains important chelated minerals for metabolism and the essential bone nutrients calcium, magnesium, and zinc.”
If you’d like to read further about doTERRA’s MicroplexVMz, feel free to check out the product information page here.
As always, if you have questions or comments or something to add, I’d love to hear it in the comments!
xoxo
